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Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

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Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#241

Post by ouid »

xhevahir wrote: post #94
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #48

For everyone commenting "laypeople aren't the intended audience", this monstrosity was a recent Texas constitutional ballot proposal, i.e. all voters in the state were asked to vote on it: > The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to provide for the reduction of the amount of a limitation on the total amount of ad valorem taxes that may be imposed for general elementary and secondary public school pu…

The assumption of most of the comments here is that bad writing is a matter of incompetence, but in the case of public policy I think Hanlon's Razor no longer applies. Given what we know about Texas politics and American ballot measures in general, it's quite possible that the ambiguity was introduced deliberately to give big landowners (or rather their lawyers) extra wiggle room. If that's true then the only communi…

Hanlon's razor is a boundary condition. No one knows how to play the game at the start. Humans get better at shit.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#242

Post by gault8121 »

resonious wrote: post #231
alar44 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that our legal system should be understandable by the dumbest person? I don't see how that's feasible or desirable.

I think we can find some middle ground between understandable-by-dumbest-person and "impossible to comprehend".

Exactly - The Flesch Kincaid gives you ranges, and it's reasonable for amendments to be within a certain range. For example, in Florida, all life insurance policies must have a Flesch Kincaid score of at least 45. This still scores as "Difficult to Fairly Difficult." It'd be interesting to see what the readability scores are for different amendments.

> "The text achieves a minimum score of 45 on the Flesch reading ease test as computed in subsection (5) or an equivalent score on any other test comparable in result and approved by the office;"

https://www.flsenate.gov/laws/statutes/2011/627.4145

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#243

Post by gault8121 »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #229
alar44 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that our legal system should be understandable by the dumbest person? I don't see how that's feasible or desirable.

I doubt that is what they are saying. It seems more likely they are saying the text should not be "extremely difficult to read" or "impossible to comprehend". Though actually what they are saying is "I put the text in these algorithms and got these scores". It is left to others to draw conclusions like I did above.

Yes, exactly. You can draw whatever conclusion you'd like from the data, and many text scoring systems have issues, but there is still a clear pattern here where this text is far outlier.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#244

Post by gault8121 »

varenc wrote: post #234
alar44 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that our legal system should be understandable by the dumbest person? I don't see how that's feasible or desirable.

These are the scores for the ballot measure that Texas voters were supposed to vote yes or no on. So absolutely yes. When you're asking people to vote on something, and you actually want informed voters, I unquestionably want ballot measures to be understandable by everyone that reads them.

Exactly - The Flesch Kincaid gives you ranges, and it's reasonable for amendments to be within a certain range. For example, in Florida, all life insurance policies must have a Flesch Kincaid score of at least 45. This still scores as "Difficult to Fairly Difficult." It'd be interesting to see what the readability scores are for different amendments. > "The text achieves a minimum score of 45 on the Flesch reading ease test as computed in subsection (5) or an equivalent score on any other test comparable in result and approved by the office;"

https://www.flsenate.gov/laws/statutes/2011/627.4145

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#245

Post by bagels »

alar44 wrote: post #226
gault8121 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are the text complexity scores from different measures for this text. Flesch Reading Ease score: -24 (text scale) Flesch Reading Ease scored your text: impossible to comprehend. Gunning Fog: 40.7 (text scale) Gunning Fog scored your text: EXTREMELY difficult to read. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 35.7 Grade level: College Graduate and above. The Coleman-Liau Index: 13 Grade level: college The SMOG Index: 25 Grade…

Are you suggesting that our legal system should be understandable by the dumbest person? I don't see how that's feasible or desirable.

Everyone is subject to the law. How can you have any hope of following a law you cannot read? It certainly should be a goal.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#246

Post by idontpost »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #237
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're safe in voting against it (which, obnoxiously enough, can sometimes mean voting yes) Sure but if you literally cannot understand it, it may be difficult to determine whether voting against it means voting yes or no.

I don’t know, but my assumption as a voter would be that voting no is always a vote for the status quo

And you would be wrong.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#247

Post by suifbwish »

dctoedt wrote: post #198
rayiner wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true in general. There was a lot of disagreement over the scope of things like the Commerce Clause, Necessary and Proper Clause, etc. I don’t think that’s true of the Second Amendment specifically. It was written by a bunch of men who had just used guns they had lying around their farms to form militias and overthrow their government. I don’t think it’s a great mystery what they meant when they wrote the Secon…

> a bunch of men who had just used guns they had lying around their farms to form militias and overthrow their government. That pretty seriously overstates the case: The American Revolution started out that way, but as time went on, the Continental Army acquired serious artillery and became reasonably professional — thanks largely to Henry Knox; Baron von Steuben; and the Marquis de La Fayette — and the decisive fact…

There is no law preventing civilians from owning cannons and other artillery of any caliber so long as they are not automatic.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#248

Post by vjk800 »

Quarrel wrote: post #28

I've been a CTO at companies in various bits of the Anglosphere, and signed contracts in all of the bits (and some other places). I'm also married to an Anglosphere lawyer (which gives me lots more exposure than I might have guessed to the idiosyncrasies of the profession). In my experience, I very much agree with the headline (and abstract) here, but would emphasise that the US is the worst for archaic language, cre…

> I would very much argue against those (even in this thread), that say that the lay-person isn't the intended audience for lots of contracts, particularly for T&Cs where they are often written by a contracts lawyer, for a contracts lawyer or judge, but should ABSOLUTELY be written for the lay-person to understand.

I would argue that if a lay-person is expected to comply with the law/contract, then lay-person should be the intended audience.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#249

Post by Sprocklem »

Pxtl wrote: post #216
photochemsyn wrote: post #89

Here's a good example of 'center-embedded clauses' making a paragraph difficult to interpret - it's from the revamped USA-Canada-Mexico trade deal, specifically a side agreement between the USA and Canada on energy-related trade: > "Each Party shall endeavor to ensure that energy-related activities that do not result in a facility exceeding its previously authorized capacity and that are limited to performing mainten…

I feel like complex sentences like this need braces to make them clear. Like, programming-language-style indentation would help a lot. " Each Party shall endeavor to ensure that { energy-related activities that { do not result in a facility exceeding its previously authorized capacity AND that are limited to { performing maintenance work on, OR ensuring the safety of, } existing cross-border infrastructure } may be u…

Alternatively, this is the original sentence with the embedded clauses moved to the end:

> Each Party shall endeavor to ensure that energy-related activities may be undertaken under the initial authorization and shall not require a new authorization, as long as these activities do not result in a facility exceeding its previously authorized capacity and are limited to performing maintenance work on, or ensuring the safety of, existing cross-border infrastructure.

It is incredible how much clearer the sentence becomes with this simple change. The only part that remains even slightly challenging is "or ensuring the safety of".

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#250

Post by vjk800 »

max51 wrote: post #73

At my job I have to deal with the structural design part of the building code for US and Canada (ei. calculating loads on structure). Part of my job is to find the differences in each new version to see if we need to implement anything new in our software. For seismic, the Canadian code is easy enough to understand that teachers use it in college instead of manuals or notes. To calculates something (eg. a specific wi…

> It would be a lot safer for the public if the "easy to understand" version of the code came from those who wrote the original. I suspect it's the same in other professions too.

Senior engineers probably have their own intuition to what is "safe" based on their experience, which might be more accurate than the horrible mess of a law that you describe.

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